A group of 7 developers worked on the app over a few days and as well as meeting each other and learning from each other they also managed to work on various improvements which I have summarised below.

2 factor authentication (nearly)

Work has been done towards allowing 2fa logins to the app.

Lots of the login & authentication code has been refactored and the app now uses the clientlogin API module provided by Mediawiki instead of the older login module.

When building to debug the 2fa input box will appear if you have 2fa login enabled, however the current production build will not show this box and simply display a message saying that 2fa is not currently supported. This is due to a small amount of session handling work that the app still needs.

Better menu & Logout

As development on the app was fairly non existent between mid 2013 and 2016 the UI generally fell behind. This is visible in forms, buttons as well as app layout.

One significant push was made to drop the old style ‘burger’ menu from the top right of the app and replace it with a new slide out menu draw including a feature image and icons for menu items.

Uploaded images display limit

Some users have run into issues with the number of upload contributions that the app loads by default in the contributions activity. The default has always been 500 and this can cause memory exhaustion / OOM and a crash on some memory limited phones.

In an attempt to fix and generally speed up the app a recent upload limit has been added to the settings which will limit the number images and image details that are displayed, however the app will still fetch and store more than this on the device.

Nearby places enhancements

The nearby places enhancements probably account for the largest portion of development time at the pre hackathon. The app has always had a list of nearby places that don’t have images on commons but now the app also has a map!

The map is powered by the mapbox SDK and the current beta uses the mapbox tiles however part of the plan for the Vienna hackathon is to switch this to using the wikimedia hosted map tiles at https://maps.wikimedia.org.

The map also contains clickable pins that provide a small pop up pulling information from Wikidata including the label and description of the item as well as providing two buttons to get directions to the place or read the Wikipedia article.

Image info coordinates & image date

Extra information has also been added to the image details view and the image date and coordinates of the image can now be seen in the app.

Summary of hackathon activity

The contributions and authors that worked on the app during the pre hackathon can be found on Github at the following link.

Roughly 66 commits were made between the 11th and 19th of May 2017 by 9 contributors.

I am writing this as finding the solution to the problem that I was having while mocking a Writer in Java using EasyMock took far too long. Hopefully others having the same issue will stumble across this blog post.

The old version of the wikidata-analysis repo, which generated the maps (along with other things) was terribly inefficient. The whole task of analysing the dump and generating data for various visualisations was tied together using a bash script which ran multiple python scripts in turn.

The script took somewhere between 6 and 12 hours to run.

At some points this script needed over 6GB of memory to run. And this was running when Wikidata was much smaller, this probably wouldn’t even run any more.

All of the code was hard to read, follow and understand.

The code was not maintained and thus didn’t actually run any more.

The Rewrite

The initial code that generated the map can mainly be found in the following two repositories which were included as sub-modules into the main repo:

The code worked on the Mediawiki page dumps for Wikidata and relied on the internal representation of Wikidata items and thus as this changed everything broke.

The wda repository pointed toward the Wikidata-Toolkit which is written in Java and is actively maintained, and thus the rewrite began! The rewrite is much faster, easily understood and easily expandable (maybe I will make another post about it once it is done)!

The change to the map in 19 months

Unfortunately according to the settings of my blog currently I can not upload the 2 versions of the map so will instead link to the the twitter post announcing the new map as well as the images used there (not full size).

Stop the rewrite of the dump analyser using somewhere between 1 and 2GB ram.

Problem: Currently the rewrite takes the data it wants and collects it in a Java JSON object writing to disk at the end of the entire dump has been read. Because of this lots of data ends up in this JSON object and thus in memory, and as we analyse things more this problem is only going to get worse.

Solution: Write all data we want directly to disk. After the dump has fully been analysed read all of these output files individually and put them in the format we want (probably JSON).

Make all of the analysis run whenever a new JSON dump is available!

Keep all of the old data that is generated! This will mean we will be able to look at past maps. Previously the maps were overwritten every day.

Fix the interactive map!

Problem: Due to the large amount of data that is now loaded (compared with then the interactive map last worked 19 months ago) the interactive map crashes all browsers that try to load it.

Solution: Optimise the JS code for the interactive map!

Add more data to the interactive map! (of course once the task above is done)